Wallace in his commencement speech starts
off by openly saying that it will not be a typical commencement speech. Instead
of giving words of encouragement and hopefulness he tells the new graduates
that their life is not going to be as they dreamed it would be. Wallace calls
out that his speech will be different right away. He says we are all by nature
self-centered and trying to distinguish himself from the average speaker. This
right away makes me feel that he himself is this self-centered, and as he goes
on to explain that he indeed normal and self-centered. This talk goes on with
Wallace assuming that everyone in the audience is like him in this matter,
which I believe is not true. A quick Google search brings up that Kenyon is a
private university that does help his general audience, but I feel as he is
leaving out one group of students. These students being the ones who may be the
first of their families to go to school, the students who were promised their
dreams with this degree, the students who had to measure out every penny to pay
for this schooling. Wallace says that now that they are finish with their
schooling that life will become a boring routine, and that students will fall
to negative thoughts about those around them in their daily lives. This is
something I truly disagree with for a couple of reasons. The first reason is
simply that some people will truly enjoy their work. Not everyone will go to
work in a stressful environment and live life stuck in a routine. While that
may be the case for most of those in audience there will be those who
absolutely love their jobs and leave work with a smile everyday. Then there are
those who will be just grateful to be alive and well. The people who take every
breath granted automatically cause they were not programmed to worry about themselves
first. To wrap up my thoughts I think that David Wallace made a poor choice in
his commencement speech to these new graduates.
I am going to have to disagree with you, because I do not believe in sugarcoating. Although sugarcoating and words of encouragement are a little different they can be taken the same way. If you want to set someone up for success keep their standards low and when the students succeed they are all the happier. In every society built there is a common thread, not everyone gets what they want, and I feel like he was simply explaining that. Someone can be happy to be alive but definitely not happy with how their life turned out. That is why we have midlife crisis because suddenly someone realizes that they are boring or of that nature. I agree with the speech because I feel like it woke them up to see from there on out it is not all rainbows and unicorns. An example was me as a junior in high school. Pretty athletic dude, and would love to continue his sporting career. The head football coach, who I knew pretty well, told the whole football team that if anyone was there for scholarships get out. That was a shock to our systems, I mean nobody ever talked to us like that before. We were used to daddy and mommy saying, you’re our little NFL star. I told my coach I would prove him wrong, and even though I was above average at playing football, I did not look good on paper. Meaning I was not 6’6 and 210 ibs. Looking back I liked that he said something about it, even though I was bull headed and still tried I was not as upset about it. Words of encouragement are nice but when it comes to the real world I cant be mad at this guy’s speech.
ReplyDeleteJackson, I agree strongly with what you said. Graduation should be a time of excitement and achievement. I believe that you can do anything you set your mind to, that if you believe in yourself you will achieve your goals. Even though college is an exciting time in your life it can also be a very scary time as well. You are in your early twenties with no job and in most cases with a lot of student loan debt. I do not believe that you need a random stranger to tell you that life is hard (I’m sure their parents have already done that). After a quick Google search on David Foster Wallace, I soon found out that he suffered from great depression. I found that very evident in his commencement speech, most scholars would have looked back on their graduation and thought about how happy their were at that time, saying words of encouragement. The Dean of Kenyon should have done more research on Wallace before inviting him to be the 2005 commencement speaker. Though Wallace made valid points to not expect everything in life to be handed to you, he expressed his word very poorly. We are all here for a very short period of time and sure there is going to be difficult task that come into our paths but believing in yourself and surround yourself by people who love you and believe in you, you will be able to do great things and be happy!
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